Adding a Colour tone to your Black & White pictures No.1

Have you ever wanted to add a classic vintage tone like Sepia, Cyanotype or an old style to your picture? I learnt this technique ages ago and use it for a lot of my work, so thought i would share it.

1. Open your image into Photoshop and convert it to Black & White using a black and white adjustment layer (Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Black and White), rather than converting to grey scale (not only do you protect the image using layers, you are also able to work on the colour channels independently after the B&W conversion to get exactly the look you want. For this technique to work you also need the image in RGB mode). Once the layer has been applied, you can work on the colour channels.

2. Apply a Hue/Saturation layer to this image (Layers/New Adjustment Layer/Hue & Saturation or from the adjustment panel (Window/Adjustments). Once this panel is displayed, make sure the small check box colorize, is ticked on.

3. In the preset combo box (above at the top of the Hue/Saturation panel (see point 2)) choose your tone that you would like to apply to your image. You are obviously able to change the opacity in the layer to suit to look that you want for your final image.

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